Windows binaries

Dirk Hohndel dirk at hohndel.org
Fri Nov 25 20:41:07 PST 2011


Sorry for the late response - this got dropped a couple of trips ago :-/

On Thu, 3 Nov 2011 03:42:22 +0200, "Lubomir I. Ivanov" <neolit123 at gmail.com> wrote:
> hello,
> i have an almost ready instructions on how to target win32 from win32 for
> subsurface.
> i.e. place something on the website for windows devs as its a bit
> complicated....
> 
> but i have some (mostly legal) questions:
> 1) would it be ok to distribute all the runtime libs (DLL) in a zip from the
> website - seems like the win32 install package is doing that pretty much? is it
> required to provide source code download links in the zip archive in question;
> or something else ?

IANAL - different people appear to have different opinions what exactly
is required if you want to distribute DLLs. I tend to agree with the
people who believe that for an open source project that uses unmodified
libraries as distributed by a distribution and simply compiles them as a
convenience for the user, it is ok to point to the distribution as a
place to get the sources from. 

So I am happy to post the Windows installer on my site. I just updated
the cross compiling setup for subsurface and finished refactoring the
preferences settings code (it's now broken out into three files linux.c,
windows.c, and macos.c). I also believe I've fixed the typecast warnings
that you provided a patch for a while ago (but of course the patch no
longer applies with the refactored code - it also dropped the TEXT()
macro which my reading of the reference docs makes me believe is
incorrect).

> 2) i have a folder over here called c:\dev\linuxlibs\... containing all the
> needed libraries + a pkg-config setup (.PC files). would it be ok to zip this
> one as well and provide it for download from the website. would this violate
> licenses ?

See above. I don't think so. As I am cross compiling I am taking a
different approach, though. I assume people install the cross compiled
MinGW packages from their distribution to build Windows binaries. I'll
be happy to ALSO distribute the necessary instructions to make it easy
for people to build natively - as long as your changes don't break cross
compilation or any of the native builds.
 
> the idea would be to make it _quite_ easy for a win32 developers to just grab
> the latest dev-src directory for all the packages like (libdivecomputer,
> libxml), use a makefile, build...and after the exe is compiled place it amongst
> the required DLL's from the other zip.

Yes, that sounds good.

/D


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